2 New Kent Residents Find 'Not Here' Ideal

July 14, 2000|By MATHEW PAUST Daily Press

NEW KENT — A recent miff in the state legislature put a couple of New Kent wits on a campaign to make the 1930's song "Not Here - Not There" the town's anthem.

Fred Bahr, a former member of the New Kent Board of Supervisors, found amusing a Daily Press Radar column item in February that described Del. George Grayson's valiant defense of New Kent during a House of Delegates debate.

Grayson, who represents New Kent, took tongue-in- cheek umbrage over a remark by Del. Bob McDonnell of Virginia Beach that New Kent is "in the middle of nowhere." The debate was over a bill affecting Colonial Downs, which is located in New Kent.

"I want to remind the gentleman from Virginia Beach that New Kent is the home of George Washington's mother [actually the home of his wife], the home of John Tyler's wife and the home of Sheriff Farrar 'Wakie' Howard, to whom I have sent your license tag number in hopes that you may meet when you return home via I-64," Grayson thundered.

Long after the debate's echoes had faded away, one line stuck in Bahr's head: "in the middle of nowhere." He'd heard something like that somewhere, he knew, and then it came to him: a song.

"A couple of the Wiffenpoofs used to sing it in the '30s," he says. Bahr was a student at Yale University in the 1930s. The Wiffenpoofs were a music group at Yale. They are to Yale music what Skull and Bones is to secret Yale society.

Bahr started hunting.

"I checked at the local library, the Richmond library and the Virginia State Library. I thought the song was 'Fifty Miles from Nowhere,'" he says.

Another New Kent resident and fellow Rotarian, Stran Trout, found the song during an exhaustive search of the Internet, Bahr says, and he learned that it was called "Not Here - Not There." Bahr had been close. The song's subtitle was "Fifty Miles from Nowhere."

Bahr remembered a friend in Detroit who had an extensive collection of sheet music. Sure enough, the friend had a copy of this one, and mailed it to Bahr, along with tapes of a couple of player-piano renditions. The song was published in 1923 by Mort Dixon and Ernest Breuer.

It was performed again Monday night for the select audience of the New Kent Board of Supervisors and all who attended the board's regular meeting.

"I sang, and Mark Daniel accompanied me on guitar." Bahr says the duo performed at the behest of the Rotary Club, of which both are members. Daniel also chairs the New Kent Chamber of Commerce.

Bahr sang: "Just put that map right on your lap and spread it on your knee. That's geography? It don't seem right to me. There's cities here, there's cities there. There's cities all around. But there's one spot the map forgot, and that's just where I'm bound. Not here, not there, it's 50 miles from nowhere, but it's my hometown..."

Applause was modest, he says, adding that the board took no action on his suggestion, at the Rotary Club's behest, that the song be considered for enshrinement as the official New Kent County Anthem.

Mathew Paust can be reached at 229-2854 or by e-mail at mpaust@dailypress.com